How to Successfully Measure your "Quality" of Hire?

Quality of Hire - a term I do not enjoy that much. It always reminds me of food products on the shelves of a supermarket. Is that aubergine fresh?

Nah, jokes aside, the term is not the best but the intentions behind it are pure. We want to know whether our talent acquisition processes are strong enough to bring out the "greatness" of our people!

So how would one measure the "quality" of hire? I suggest we first understand what goes into making a great hire at your company and only then come up with ways you are going to measure that.

Sounds simple enough from the birds-eye view, but as a lover of practical and helpful articles I will put some examples of what goes into making a great hire in general:

• Employer Brand - are you attracting the right person? Will the good "quality" candidate be interested in your business? How have you ensured that your Employer Value Proposition is well defined and visible? Are your Careers page easy to navigate and apply to your jobs frictionless?
• Recruitment Strategy - are you targeting the right channels to advertise your roles? Are you making your roles live in a timely manner and update roles that have been filled? Does your advert look like there is an awesome job hiding behind it? Is your Job Description clear, inspiring, inclusive, non-bias and most of all relevant for the level of professional you are looking for?
• Interview & Application Process - have you set yourself goals and expectations for your time management of the pipeline? Have you prepared your interviewers and upskilled them enough to assess candidates successfully? Are your interviewing questions prepared in advance to provide a seamless conversational format to your interview as well as test the key subjects important to the role?
• Onboarding Process - have you designed the onboarding sessions that will set you new hire up for success? Have these sessions managed to introduce them well to your objectives and mission? Did they connect the new hire with all the relevant people and ensure they have a support system in place while they are getting through their first few weeks?
• Setting Goals & Framework - have you shared your expectations with the new hire regarding their first X months with you? Do these expectations provide enough structure and information to make sure that your new hire is able to track their progress against them?

Your new hire will only be as great as you will empower them to be!

Measuring the "Quality" of Hire

Thank you for sticking with me so far... I am excited to share more! Let's talk about the various ways you could measure your "quality" of hire.

1. You could measure your recruitment process's experience from the candidate's point of view via their eNPS scores post the interview. This will allow you to get more insight into their experience of being interviewed and going through the process with you. You can use that feedback to ensure that your process attracts and retains engagement from your pipeline in the future.
2. You could also measure how successful your onboarding was by introducing an onboarding survey a few weeks/months into their probation and ask about their experience, what they've learned so far and how they feel. You could collect some qualitative data too by organising 1:1s with your new hires a couple of weeks into their onboarding. Your onboarding is extremely important as it contributes to the new hires perceived "quality" at the end.
3. You could simply ask their manager and peers. Depending on your style and resources you could create a process for gathering 360 feedback or arranging for Manager Surveys to provide line managers with a channel to feedback their experience and impressions from working with the new hire.

The most important thing to remember is that "quality" is an elusive term that will mean different things to different companies. You will need to identify what "good" means to you and find a way of measuring how well you are performing on those parameters. Once you know "where" you sit now with your numbers you will be able to create and tune your processes in a way that will affect them positively.

Good luck & let me know how it worked out ;)